Is anybody aware of problems in this specific android api revision with TimeZone and Date parsing? This is a very strange issue to me, as it the android version should return exactly the same as the java se version but doesn't.

I have tested in windows java and android2.3. I am getting the same result in both of the case. I think the bug is no more in android 2.3. Anyway
please check the import statements for android versus that of java

This fixed an issue I was having when using a common SimpleDateFormat object to format a set of times that spanned a DST change. If the first time in the set was after the DST threshold, all times in the set were formatted correctly. If the first time in the set was before the DST threshold, then all times after the DST threshold were incorrectly formatted (i.e. were one hour out) - and this continued even when I tried calling setTimeZone() before every format() call.

What I inferred from this is that the time zone used by the SimpleDateFormat object is tied to the first format() call, and subsequent calls to setTimeZone() are effectively ignored or overwritten (which sounds to me like a Java issue, rather than an Android issue).